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High priests of climatism don’t want public light in their temple

The term “manufacture consensus” wasn’t coined to mean what it apparently does in the grand debate on whether the Earth has, in Al Gore’s inimitable turn of phrase, “a fever.”

No information has been made available as to where Gore jammed in the thermometer and thus gathered the data on which to base his famous declaration. It is, however looking less and less as though the planet’s temperature was taken orally.

It also appears even less as though a real thermometer was used for the measurement.

What is looking more certain is that the science isn’t nearly so settled as has been claimed.

We know these things because a hacker, doing what used to be called whistleblowing, got his hands on a treasure trove of e-mails among the world’s most prominent climate researchers, who were speaking in the cybersphere equivalent of Richard Nixon’s unguarded comments that were captured on tape. New snippets of the Nixon tapes still are being released these days, almost four decades after the fact.

As it happens, the entire trove of more than 1,000 e-mails among luminaries of the global-warming cult, who ritually don Gore-like fright wigs to scare the bejeebers out of anyone who will listen, will play out more quickly than the Nixon tapes.

The similarities, however, are more significant.

Trademark Nixonian disregard and hatred for opponents is pretty standard stuff for the high-minded priests of the global-warming cult. In one e-mail, one of them dismisses as “idiots” those skeptics who dared question data tied together with what scientists admit was “a trick,” to show a global warming trend.

The original Tricky Dick could aspire to no greater heights.

Actually, the high priests of climatism aspired to heights even greater than those of Tricky Dick.

Like Tricky Dick, the high priests of climatism are fond of strong leaders, the kinds of leaders whose popularity inspires people to take strong and decisive actions, leaders such as Henry II of England, who famously wondered to no one in particular, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” in reference to Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury.

Henry being king and all, someone decided to take the hint and the archbishop was slain.

Phil Jones, director of the what’s fast seeming a motley CRU (Britain’s Climate Research Unit), told another scientist that he would have nothing to do with a climate journal that employed “this troublesome editor.”

The editor was suspected of involvement in heresy, which is to say he had raised questions about global warming and its supposed man-made origins.

Another of the high priests, Kevin E. Trenberth, lamented in one e-mail that he couldn’t explain why the Earth wasn’t growing more feverish, as alarmists had forecast.

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Trenberth wrote. “Our observing system is inadequate.”

While it’s on the other side of the distant Atlantic, the CRU touches all of us daily. It supplied the data relied upon by the United Nations to say it was “very likely” that man’s emissions of carbon dioxide were endangering the planet. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency similarly relied on the CRU when it declared earlier this year that carbon dioxide needed regulation as a pollutant.

While supplying data to the UN and EPA, the CRU was engaged on another, more prosaic front — fending off inquiries about how it obtained and treated its data.

Speaking of two prominent skeptics, Jones wrote to one of the alarmist cabal, “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone.”

Talk about recognizing “no controlling legal authority.” Defenders of the faith have pointed out that the e-mails were hacked, sidestepping in Nixonian fashion the issue of whether they all should have been made public years ago.

It might be that obtaining and releasing the e-mails is a crime. But their content suggests that for all the cultish interest in heat, the global-warming crowd has a Nixonian aversion to light.